Blues for the Red Planet

• Why Martians? Mars is the nearest planet with a visible surface, and superficially looks Earthlike.
• Mars became a mythic arena for us to play out our fantasies.
• The martial-sounding music used in the video is from a suite by Gustav Holst called
The Planets

War of the Worlds
• Written by H.G. Wells in 1897, the first work of science fiction to depict aliens with nothing in common with humans.
• The video depiction of aliens focusing on
Earth is unrealistic; telescopes simply cannot see details that small
• In 1938, a celebrated broadcast of War of
the Worlds caused a nationwide scare.

The Canals of Mars
• In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni
Schiaparelli announced that he saw canali on Mars.
• Canali means "channels" in Italian, but was promptly mistranslated into English as
"canals"
• The American astronomer Percival Lowell was the most famous champion of canals on Mars

The only question was which end of the telescope the intelligence was on.

• Dubious Effects always on the threshold of detectability
• Resist all efforts to amplify or record
• Almost always prove spurious
• Examples
– Canals on Mars
– N-Rays
– Cold Fusion

The fantasy was simply more exciting than the reality.
• Alfred Russell Wallace pointed out correctly that Mars was too cold and airless for canals to work.
• Long after most astronomers ceased to believe in canals, popular media continued to speculate about the canals.
• Similarly, long after astronomers knew that
Venus was too hot for life, popular media speculated about life on Venus.

• Viking 1 and 2 carried several experiments to detect life
• The results were ambiguous. The soil reacted vigorously with the nutrients, then tapered off in activity.
• The conclusion of most scientists is that the reactions were due to inorganic chemical reactions.

Reasons to be a "Carbon chauvinist".
• Carbon can bond to four neighboring atoms
• Carbon can bond to other carbon atoms, sharing one, two, or three electrons
• These properties make it possible to form a vast array of organic molecules
• No other element has these properties

• Water stays liquid over a wide range of temperatures.
• Water is a polar or asymmetrical molecule. It attracts ions easily, making it a good transporter of nutrients
• It does not dissolve organic molecules (so we do not dissolve in our own cell fluids)

You can buy the exact number and proportion of atoms to make a human for only a few dollars.
• You can buy the exact number and proportion of atoms to make a Lexus from a junkyard for only a few dollars, too
• If you want to talk about the exact arrangement of the atoms, the price goes up sharply.
• Buying the exact organic molecules that make up a human would cost millions of dollars, and many cannot yet be synthesized at all